In the morning I walked to Eik en Linde. The sky was overcast and there was a cold breeze making the walk unpleasant. My body had a throbbing goodness reverberating through it, after-effects of shrooms. I seemed to have great days after shrooming. Something about them mixed well with my chemistry, even after bad trips. My first two experiences this trip were entirely positive, fascinating and insightful. I chalked it up to my anxiety having dissipated and my depression passed. Amazing to heal oneself, but of course I hadn’t done it without help. Amsterdam deserved an assist, those I met in the city, and of course the shrooms and cannabis. Again, I sighed at the stupidity of psychology for not understanding humanity. If healing isn’t self-directed it won’t work, but that means putting decision-making powers and resources in the hands of the depressed and anxious. Environment was crucial for me, both physically and socially. Having legal choices to hire an escort and purchase shrooms and cannabis made a huge difference. No way the psychiatric and psychological industries would support that; they would point out that self-directed approaches wouldn’t work for everyone and they certainly wouldn't condone the use of drugs that weren't profitable for pharmaceutical companies nor would they agree that escorts could provide sex therapy. Assholes. They might agree about the environment and social interaction, but what did the industry do to create those opportunities? Little to nothing. A big part of that is the fault of politics and economics; yet more reasons to restructure them.
I hadn’t been to Eik en Linde since returning and I wanted to say hello to Kasper and any regulars I recognized. When I arrived there were five people at the bar. I looked up at the backwards running clock and it took me back as if I had been gone for years. Throughout the brown café there was quiet relaxation, perhaps some hung over melancholy as well. Two older guys were playing the weird game of pool with two white balls and three red balls, banking the balls off the sides trying to tap one of the other balls. I couldn’t tell if they were supposed to strike the white ball off three banks to hit a red or if it was the other way around. I wanted to know, but just as a way to talk about something happening. I didn’t care about the game, but the players did and I loved listening to people talk about their passions no matter what they were.
It wasn’t yet 10:00 AM and I knew this because the clock said it was past two. Kasper was busy making an espresso so he didn’t see me walk in the door. Peter wasn’t there and I only knew the others by face. One man nodded in recognition and I waved hello. I sat on a stool on the tip of the curly Q. I watched Kasper as he worked. He turned to take the espresso to an older woman and as he did so I caught his eye. He stutter-stepped as he did a double-take and I thought he might drop the tiny cup and saucer. Instead, he steadied himself and placed the saucer in front of the woman. He walked over to greet me, shaking my hand. “When did you get back?” I told him over the weekend. I said, “I’m living on Kerkstraat now so it’s a little more of a walk, but not too far.” He nodded, “That’s right, you mentioned you were moving to Kerkstraat.” I smiled, “It’s good to see you, Kasper.” He nodded, "You, too. What can I get you?" I responded, “Ik wil tosti en coffee.” A tosti was cheese on toast. Kasper gave me a look. “Changing things up, eh? Trying to expand your Dutch a little, too, I see.” I said, “‘A little’ being the key words.” Kasper laughed as he walked away to place the order. I saw Philip’s red hair and thought, “Just like old times.” I felt at home.
How wonderful to come back to a place that feels like home, to people who feel like old, old friends. Funny how little time it takes to make rich connections with open-hearted people, people so comfortable with themselves that they hide little from the world and embrace newcomers easily and readily … if the newcomers are open to it and embrace openness with a similar spirit. Being willing and able to laugh at oneself was also a necessity. Places and people like these made me doubt Foucault even if my doubting was naïve. The world wasn’t entirely shit. It couldn’t be and I had evidence … or was I just in the right place at the right time, a pocket of beauty that may or may not last? Fuck it. Kasper brought my coffee and I said to him, “As long as there is still coffee we should be okay.” Kasper shivered his head and said, “What’s going on in your mind today?” I laughed, “Oh, just musings that needn’t be thought at all.” I paused and said, “I shroomed again last night.” Kasper rolled his eyes and chuckled. “Michael, Michael, Michael.” I cut him short, “No, Kasper, this time it’s a vision quest rather than recreational. Well, a mix, anyway.” He raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Okay.” Then he smirked, “You let me know how that goes. At least you know where the hospital is now.” He was too far away for me to punch him in the arm so I just grumbled with amusement. “Smart ass.” Kasper laughed and tended to others at the bar.
After I finished eating and had an after-breakfast espresso, I left Eik en Linde, waving good bye. I wandered toward Bloem. The cafe didn’t open until noon and it was only 11:30. I walked by my old apartment then ventured into the section of the Oude Zijde I loved. It was as pleasing as I remembered. The gray skies dropped a little rain. I hadn’t brought an umbrella so I stayed on the tree-lined streets to stay dry. The drizzle added something to the neighborhood. There were hardly ever any people about. I remembered the inside-out man and wondered what happened to him. He was probably running the country by now.
I doubled back to Bloem. I didn’t want to get caught in a downpour in case the skies became angry. It was after noon when I arrived and Daniel had the place in order. He was behind the bar doing a little organizing when he saw me. “Hey, Michael. Good to see you.” He asked if I wanted lunch and I mentioned that I had a late breakfast. I ordered a cappuccino. Daniel went to work on it and I mentioned how much fun I’d had at Anabel’s going-away party. Daniel said, “Yeah, it was a good time.” We chatted on and off. A few customers came inside and sat down at a table. Daniel was busy for a bit and then settled back down behind the bar after placing their order in the kitchen. I hadn’t met the cook, but I knew he was a Turkish fellow, very nice, but spoke little English. He spoke Dutch pretty well, but that didn’t help me one bit.
“Daniel, you mentioned a bike shop the other day.” Another customer came in and Daniel tended to her. He had two tables he was serving so I sipped my cappuccino and enjoyed being in the space. I liked watching Daniel work. He was always relaxed and graceful as he moved. It was evident he had been at this a long time and his attitude made it clear he relished his work. I hadn’t noticed in the past, but today I saw how much he valued making each customer feel welcome and important. When he finally had a short break he wrote down the address of the bike shop and explained how to get there. I knew I would have to google it because it was clearly far enough north and east to be off any guide maps. I made a mental note to go the next day. “How much does a good bicycle cost?” He said, “Well, for a good reliable bike that isn’t overly attractive to thieves, hmmm, anywhere from 75 to 125 Euros. It just depends on how nice you want your ride to be. Do not spend over 150 Euros if you don’t want your bike stolen. Granted, it could get stolen no matter what which is why you need to get a top of the line lock. That might run you 30 Euros, give or take. Trust me, you’ll thank me for that. It's not that the locks are foolproof, but thieves will go after easier targets if they're available--it's Amsterdam so there are always more bikes around. Oh, and always lock both your tire and frame to a bike rack or something very solid.” I thanked Daniel for the advice.
Daniel was busy again. When he next had a break I ordered grilled lamb with red potatoes, a cucumber salad, and a beer. Bloem was picking up and a young man, maybe 6’2’’ with curly brown hair, came in to work with Daniel. His name was Tom and I discovered he was also a grad student at the University of Amsterdam. Like everyone else who worked at Bloem, he was good-looking, extremely intelligent, good-natured, and fun to be around. When Daniel had another break and I had finished my food, he took me out by the bike racks, looking them over to show me a few different types of locks. “See this one? This is the type you want. This other one will work, too, but I would purchase this one even though it’s more expensive. Again, depends on how much you spend on the bike. If you buy something cheap you don’t need to bother, but you want a decent bike if you’re going to be riding a lot.” I planned on it and salivated over how much fun I was going to have zooming around the city. I was also looking forward to being able to roam farther in a fraction of the time. Daniel said, “See this lock and this lock?” I nodded. “They’re cheap, they won’t hold up to bolt cutters at all. The bikes they’re locking aren’t worth stealing, though. These locks are just to keep people from walking up to them to ride away, but they can’t be resold for shit so no serious thief will bother.” I nodded and thanked Daniel for providing a window into Amsterdam bike culture. I knew bike theft was the number one crime in Amsterdam so I appreciated Daniel taking the time to explain some of the nuances.
Daniel and Tom became busier and busier as more customers trickled into Bloem and lingered to talk and work on their computers. Some were students, others employees from nearby design and software companies, and couples or friends enjoying an afternoon together. I thanked Daniel again, bid he and Tom adieu, and left. As I walked up Plantage Kerklaan and made my way home I decided I would try the Hawaiian shrooms in the evening. I had all my accessories laid out on the coffee table from the previous night even though I didn’t use any of them. I still had a couple cigarettes left because I'd had little urge to smoke. It had been an evening of breathing. Still, I stopped at Albert Heijn and purchased another pack along with a quart of orange juice, milk, and cereal. I crossed the Magere Brug and walked to my apartment. I plopped down on the couch and tuned to a slow jazz station to unwind.
I made a Cobb salad for supper. I had a beer, smoked a bowl, and ate Hawaiian mushrooms. I left my apartment and went for a walk to Utrechtsestraat, turned south, crossed the bridge over Prinsengracht, and Frederiksplein opened to me. I found a bench and sat down. I had an iPod with ear buds in my pocket, but I left them there so I could be fully in touch with my environment. I watched a few pedestrians walking through the park. I noticed the growing darkness of the early evening and felt the chill in the air. I was grateful there was no rain.
I felt the effects of the shrooms within ten minutes of sitting down. I experienced no heightened sensations. Instead, I felt clouds of thought dissipate and the world of my mind cleared. New thoughts flowed, thoughts unrelated to my surroundings. Perhaps it was because the relative darkness dulled visual stimuli. The park was quiet as well, no smells, a consistency of cold without wind, and nothing but the taste of my tongue. Thoughts bubbled from nowhere. Why was there not an economic system based on time instead of productivity? An artificial limitation of twenty-four hours in a day had been created and yet, for many, so few hours were dedicated to noneconomic activities. I was fortunate in this regard because of the nature of my work and the per-hour rate of pay. A word came to me: Leisure. Why wasn’t labor paid in leisure time in exchange for productivity? Labor’s time was devoted to the interests of ownership and ownership’s time was devoted to profitability. Profit, evidently, was the species at the top of the food chain. Humans ate animals and plants; profits ate the time and energy of human activity.
A soft breeze moved through the park. It began elsewhere, but found its way to this location. I stared straight ahead. My sight went to the silhouettes of branches of trees above me. I saw the configuration as two dimensional. There wasn’t enough light to create three dimensions. How significant light was to visual perception and perspective. Changes in perception and perspective were huge in conceiving the world, creating a story about what is and what isn’t. Language couldn’t adequately reflect occurrences such as these or else I simply lacked the creativity and vocabulary to do so. Language, from my perspective (again with perspective), appeared to be a defense mechanism against the perception of what was perceived and experienced. The shadowy darknesses (branches) that were given shape by the lighter darknesses (sky) were created by subtle contrasts within the same color range of gray-black or charcoal. There were no branches and there was no sky as far as visual perception was concerned. But my mind tried to force those definitions onto the shapes and those definitions altered what was seen. A schism developed between what I thought was there and what I saw was there. In my shrooming state, visual perception won; in states of “sobriety” (as if such a thing exists) interrelated concepts developed over a lifetime won.
This was the battle, the battle between thought and senses. I had been conditioned to be a language practitioner which had resulted in my being separated perceptually from the world in possibly infinite ways. My thought starkly shifted as I saw a figure walk past me on the path in front of the bench. Black shoes, black pants, and a black overcoat. Black hair and black eyes as well. Whiteness of a … face? The figure was a man clothed in black. The clothing and hair seemed truly black, but his eyes? Could they have been black? No, my thought didn’t believe it was possible. It said, “The eyes appeared black because there wasn’t enough light to see the color of the irises.” Irises? Color? Those things were imperceptible yet my mind believed in them more than what my eyes had seen. It referred back to experiences and incomplete but highly developed theories of light and color and biology.
An iris was a representation of a part of the eye, the part that has … color. But the colors of irises change based on the light … or lack of light. A more accurate description of someone with blue eyes might be, "In this range of light at such-and-such a distance, the irises appear as a particular color of blue." If I looked up close, maybe within a few inches of another’s irises, I could see intricate patterned designs of many differing colors. By pulling back, the colors became more uniform under the same lighting conditions. Yet, the language and identification of a person’s eyes were defined strictly from a certain distance under a narrow range of lighting conditions. Why were those particular distances and lighting conditions favored over others? Were these distinctions conscious decisions made by those who classified them? Was it just lazy happenstance, a series of haphazard observations that had come to be considered facts?
Memories are like language, too, defenses against new perceptions to preserve prior constructs created to explain experiences, to settle the mind, and help build frameworks from those experiences. But if the original explanation was faulty in some way then the frameworks built around those interpretations were problematic, possibly even dangerous. Perception, it seemed to me at the time, was the result of particular perspectives that delivered stimuli which was processed as information then interpreted by using memory, language, beliefs, and values from which judgments were made then funneled through a range of preferences resulting in decision making which did or did not result in actions … which changed perceptions yet again as perspective had changed and the loop began again, continuously cycling over and over, moment to moment. This process made each person precisely who they were and also ensured that each individual was unique in many ways that could not even be detected.
The question I had was whether anyone was aware of the process as it occurred. Perhaps some of the time, but a trifling compared to the moment-to-moment cycling of such phenomena. We chose so little of who we were, of what we became, compared to what could have resulted from a near-constant conscious awareness. Our capacities did not allow this, although I understood that within each person capacities differed and, furthermore, the realization and choice to direct attention and awareness in such a way might be made by individuals with much lower capacity than another thus providing a sense that their capacity was greater than others just because it was being used—well, it appeared that way for those even able to detect such awareness.
I thought about language and memory again. In some ways, they were defenses against the senses, but they also served a purpose within the loop. After all, it was language allowing me to come up with these ideas. Yet … what if my ideas were wrong? What if I was creating a false reality through these interpretations of what I had experienced with the branches—they were branches again, not dark shapes contrasted against lighter shapes!—and the man in black. On so many levels, I was trapped … and yet liberated enough to create at least this much. Again, perspective, even a perspective shaped by language and belief, determined how I looked at what seemed to be the same thing. It wasn’t the same, though. It couldn’t be even I if I couldn’t detect the difference. But how did I know even that. Damn, the Hawaiians truly were cerebral. What a glorious thing to have descriptions of shrooming experiences offered by connoisseurs.
This loop, though, this damned loop, a skeleton process of adding flesh to the bones of what makes me … me. The loop may be damned, may be of consequence only to me, but if that was the case then at least it provided a personal out from the confines of abusive moralities in a world imposing its halitosis of judgment on my thought and actions. Fuck the world’s bankrupt thinking, the prescribed notions of good and bad, none of which seemed to have a thought worth thinking propping them up, just rotting flesh covered with salt to make the thoughts taste less rancid except to a refined palate that screws its mouth into knots to protect against saltquakes and maggoted muscles ripped from once living ideas; there was not a virtue to be found through flavor or scent, just moralism and religiosity and corporate-correctness, a corporate morality of surface-level image creation that squashed the substantive fullness of being into soulless categories of production and consumption, of buying and selling, all of it, every shred of it, shit on a stick sold for one’s entire being. No, the loop would work even if not perfect. It provided a better path than than the shit sticks passing as meaningful thought.
The shrooms charged ahead: Through each loop memories changed and shifted the relation to language. Beliefs adapted and values transformed. Within each loop, the shifts and changes were subtle. The passage of time resulted in additions and subtractions, magnifications and divisions. A person aged 25 years and 44 days may appear to have the same values and beliefs at age 25 years and 67 days, but that person’s beliefs and values were likely to appear very different at 53 years and 17 days. A single loop of perspective and perception was all but imperceptible, but the accumulation of loops over time made for radical shifts and changes. A drop of rain on a mountain caused little change to the mountain, but millions of years of rain drops dramatically changed the structure and appearance.
A gust of wind blew a flap of my collar up, slapping me on the neck. Whatever existed in the world changed the world and the nature of relations in it. I straightened my collar. Actions are reflections of the thinking most valued at a particular moment. This was storytelling of a different type. It remained structured as a narrative, but not sequential … or possibly even coherent. Self-understanding was narrative-based. Stories couldn't end as long as the loop continued. The stories might change, of course, but myth-making continued unabated. Was this an evolutionary quality within the species?
I was no more than a story I had been telling myself over the course of my life. Was I trapped, as I had thought, by language? As language disappeared … I breathed. Yes. That occurred the previous night. I was telling a story about something that did not require language. Why? My nature? The way I had been conditioned? Habits dictating the shape and flavor of my being? The structure of society demanded the use language. Unless I was willing to simply breathe until death I had to use language. Language, a blessing and a curse. Perhaps I could alternate on a regular basis; use language in situations when it was necessary then clear my mind when language wasn’t necessary. At the very least, this seemed like a worthwhile experiment.
I felt colder. The darkness bothered me and my thoughts were not helping. I rose, pushed the thought of the loop from my mind, and walked home mostly without language, observing what I saw and felt. I realized loops were occurring, but I pushed down language as much as I could so I could be attentive to the loops while they occurred. It didn’t work too well, though, as I thought, “I could become alarmed by a car horn or dazzled by a Dutch woman wearing a bikini on a cold night or … the possibilities are endless! Oh, my. Oh, it’s infinite. The loop isn’t a trap! It’s a process that enables change!” Drunk on thought.
When I arrived at my apartment and went inside, I went to my laptop. I began writing about The Loop—I decided to capitalize it. I had to describe it again.I could barely type, my eyes wide as saucers and my fingers the size of bananas. What I typed was coherent for a few lines and then a mass of incoherence dribbled forth. The incoherence made perfect sense to me at the time. It was all so simple. Why was the world making it so difficult?
After I finished writing, I went to the couch and lit a cigarette. I felt like I had just had sex. I also realized that the shrooms made everything more spectacular than they might actually be when not shrooming. But why would that matter? Why give greater weight to my perspective when not shrooming than while shrooming? I puffed away and when I was done I closed the window. The loop was churning. "I can be attentive to it if and when I want or I can ignore the process and let it go where it takes me. The difference is conscious intent versus conscious observance." I knew the procedural design that allowed conscious direction of action and I could access it whenever I chose—I hoped. I could also shut down my awareness of it—at my own peril because I might forget (ah, the importance of memory)—whenever I wanted or needed to do so.”
I wondered where my thoughts would go, if they had endless things to say, an infinity of stories to tell. I thought about my breathing, how the process was in and out. A Westerner might think that “in” and “out” were two distinctly different things. In fact, Westerners did think that. They had created categories. “In” had a definition that suggested one process and “out” had a definition that meant something different. This categorization was a type of storytelling, one creating a fundamental separation. With breathing, though, there was no out without the in and there was no in without the out. The in-out dynamic of breathing was an essential relationship that required that there be no fundamental separation. For the Westerner breathing consisted of two things whereas I saw only one thing; that one thing was the relationship of the in-out that constituted the process of breathing. Breathing in the West was primarily a noun, but I couldn’t conceive of it as anything but a verb.
I wanted to try indexing while shrooming. I opened the PDF of the text I had been indexing and scrolled to the page I wanted. I opened the indexing document and looked at the index, the headings and subheadings. I saw relationships. “I am making what was two or many into one and it is this associative process that allows readers and researchers easier access to the information they want. Indexing is relational thinking.” I had been indexing for thirteen years. “No wonder I think this way.” I had become an expert at making associations between things, creating relationships between objects and processes where others saw distinctly separate and unrelated objects or processes.
I began indexing the text and found my skills worked even better while shrooming. It was likely the Hawaiians because this trip had vastly different qualities than my experiences with Ecuadorians and McKennai. I wondered if my indexes would become increasingly complex and if I would be even more judicious in the associations I made. There was so much to process that I stopped indexing and went to the couch to sit wordlessly the rest of the night.
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